Misunderstandings in the mainstream media about the popularity of The Hunger Gamesand a deep sense of responsibility for clarifying the confusion is what got me writing this article.

The Hunger Games and other novels in the Nouveau Dystopian Wave follow in a long tradition of writing that includes Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four and Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. So, why weren’t they being taken more seriously?

People just couldn’t understand why young women would be reading books that imagined such a dreadful future. In their futile attempts at doing so the young readers of these books were often dismissed or patronised. The question of what draws people to read stories of negative futures is so intriguing to me that I jockied my life around enough to be able to go back to study to try and work it out in 2010. Then in early 2012 when the media around The Hunger Games was getting big I saw misunderstanding everywhere and I knew I had to do something to set it straight.

One of the reasons for the confusion is the prevalence and popularity of black and white attitude that positive thinking was always best – anything that said differently was odd and confusing. I wanted to use this polarised position on positive thinking as the basis of the article:

“In an era that tends to idealise positive thinking it is easy to assume it is ‘good’ and other ways of thinking are ‘bad.’”

I loved the idea of flipping the norm and handing out some advice to positive thinkers from the dystopian vaults – switching the advice flow for a while. I wanted to evoke the idea of Dystopians as a grouping of people – I identify as a dystopian; I think others do too; and, I think it connects us in meaningful ways. More than anything though I wanted to locate this new era of dystopian literature within the genre and give show it was as serious and meaningful as its predecessors like Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four and Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

The response to The Dystopians’ Guide to Positive Thinking was really amazing.

Lots of people shared the article and commented on it around the interwebs. Margaret Atwood even retweeted it (fangirl flutter):